The weird thing about not writing blogs is that the more you don't write, the more you don't write. Kind of like the whole "an object in motion, tends to stay in motion...an object at rest tends to stay at rest" principle. Except that while I haven't been writing, I've decidedly NOT been at rest.
Life is hectic, isn't it?
You look forward to your two-week vacation over the holidays, knowing you need the downtime, knowing not taking those weeks during the earlier part of the year would be worth it, knowing how much you're going to enjoy your vacation time with The Boy...only to get pneumonia and spend those two weeks coughing up blood and generally feeling grumpy, isolated, and out of control. You tell yourself that your relentless program launch schedule for Q1 2012 will be no issue because you'll be so well-rested from said two-week vacation...only to return to work, still sick, still grumpy only now instead of lying around in your pajamas all day, you're back in a cubicle that was seemingly built for raising veal, having all the creativity sucked from your body by soul-less corporate America.
You tell yourself you're going to blog your ever-loving ass off on your vacation...and one day you look up and it's mid-January and you've gone bone dry.
Well, screw that.
As I often do when navel-gazing, I find myself drawn to a particular time in my life when I said, did or thought something wrong. So let's start a new series: That OneTime I Was Wrong.
Once when I was in college, I went to meet my Mom for lunch at her office. She worked in the Marathon Oil Tower and I remember getting dresed just-so because I didn't want to look like a college student-- I wanted to look like a career woman. I wore a blue and white houndstooth skin-tight pencil skirt and a white blouse and heels...because even in college, that's how I rolled.
I met my Mom in the huge cafeteria they had in the building and as I waited for her, I noticed a woman sitting all by herself. She was wearing a suit (late-80's edition, think "Working Girl" meets high humidity) and was sitting all alone at a four-top. She looked very important. Her lunch tray was pushed to the side of her table, untouched and ignored, as she furiously worked on a report that was, no-doubt, due half an hour ago. She was completely oblivious of her surroundings and certainly never saw me staring at her.
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| God help me, I have her hair. Like, right now. |
I thought she was probably the coolest, most important career woman I had ever seen and I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to be exactly that busy, that important and that successful one day.
Oh, how wrong I was.
What I didn't see was her so-called career interfering with her private life. What I didn't see was that, if she really had been that important, she surely would not have been ignoring her lunch in the worker-bee cafeteria. What I didn't see was that she was likely turning in version seven of the same pointless report that had nothing to do with her actual job and was likely causing her to have to spend her evenings working on her actual work load.
Glamorous, right?
What I can see now is that we really do create our futures. I wanted to be that woman...and I am a version of her. My version is dressed in some pretty snazzy business casual attire versus the big shoulder-padded suit. And my version seriously could stand to skip a few meals. But as I look at my lunch, still sitting in it's bag despite the mad dash I made to pick it up 45 minutes ago, I get it. I'm her.
Only now I don't want to be.
Man, life is hectic.
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